EliyahuQeoni said:
A matter of taste I suppose, but its also been ages since I read either of them. I might think differently now. But it did seem like Ashes of Eden and the Return were by two completely different authors in a lot of ways.
They were probably conceived and developed quite differently. When they first came out, the promotion seemed to indicate that the Reeves-Stevens' contribution was adapting the novel to create the graphic novel, and then Shatner did an interview where he described how he wrote both "TekWar" and "Star Trek": narrating the action scenes and dialogue into a personal voice recorder while he went about his daily life, then having the manuscript typed up by a secretary, then polished by a pro author, then revised by Shatner, etc.
Certainly, both "Ashes" and "The Return" were movie pitches Shatner had made. The "fountain of youth" planet idea pre-dates ST V, and "The Return" was his desperate pitch to revive Kirk after "Generations".
Ugh! Avenger was awful. Having enjoyed The Return I picked up Avenger when it came out and was massively disappointed. That was the last Shatnerverse book I read. I don't suppose they improved after that?
Again, patchy. "Spectre", from memory, was excellent! It kicks off a three-part Mirror Universe saga and has lots of familiar and inevitable Mirror participants. "Dark Victory" also moves swiftly and has a great surprise twist, but this is totally messed up in "Preserver", which just meanders around, and seemingly dumps a major guest antagonist halfway through the novel.
The next three, the "Totality" saga of "Captain's Peril/Blood/Glory", are okay but have a huge emphasis on the Kirk/Picard mateship throughout. What works really well is a flashback sequence to the 5YM, and that told me that maybe Shatner should have set the whole trilogy in that era, instead of trying to shoehorn another set of Kirk stories into the 24th century.
The real-life sudden death (by accidental drowning) of Shatner's third wife caused him to do a major rethink on the plot and so he incorporates his own grief into the storyline. It all becomes rather sadly self-indulgent, of course, and no one writing these books seems to be very sure about who or what Kirk and Teilani's hybrid offspring should be like.
I've bought, but not yet read, "Academy: Collision Course" but most reviews seem to think it's a well-named novel.
